Markdown is a wonderfully simple approach to creating web pages, written by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. You get on with the business of writing (without any fancy code) and Markdown takes care of producing clean, web standards compliant HTML.

Most of the pages on a Nesta site are written in a text editor, using Markdown or Textile. You don't get to see what your words look like on a web page you save the file to disk and reload your browser. Wouldn't it be nice if your browser automatically reloaded pages as you saved them? When designing a theme, what if changes to HTML and CSS were reloaded immediately?

There are a handful of Markdown processing libraries available for Ruby, each with different advantages and features. Since version 0.9.11, Nesta uses Ryan Tomayko's [Tilt][] library to work out which processor to use when rendering a file within your content folder, which will try and pick a suitable processor for you. This recipe shows you how to change it.

Imagine for a moment that you run a blog that frequently runs articles from guest bloggers. They provide the content, and in return get some publicity and a link back to their own site from the bottom of their article. What's the best way to do this with Nesta?

It's easy to move pages with Nesta; you just move files around on disk and push your changes up to your web server. But what about all the old links to the page? You need to configure some HTTP redirects...